


Of Worms and Resurrection

by alethes



Category: Baldur's Gate
Genre: Action/Adventure, Crack, Drabble, Gen, Humor, Spoilers, baldur's gate 3 - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:34:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27523927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alethes/pseuds/alethes
Summary: Perhaps getting rid of the tadpole is easy, for those with a death wish.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Of Worms and Resurrection

“Agh!” Aster yelped, dropping the purple tadpole, “It bit me…”

Lae’zel watched her suck at the heel of her palm, unimpressed. A stronger mind would have resisted its manipulation, she thinks – one like her own, perhaps. Indeed, the gith doubted that Aster had been bitten at all. “Tssch. Your kind lacks discipline.”

“Of course,” the ranger murmured around the wound and drew her hand back to survey the damage the worm had wrought, “why shouldn’t I have dedicated my entire adulthood and early-life to training my mind to defend itself from psychic attacks by an alien life form that I could have gone three lifetimes without ever encountering?”

“They’re actually quite active along the Sword Coast, if rumours are to be believed” Gale intoned, scratching his jaw in thought, “I’m not sure about meeting one… Someone connected to them though…”

Aster looked at them both, disbelievingly. The gith was dead serious, of course, but the mage had gone off on a tangent, surely.

“Right,” she said, biting back some choice words, and dropped her hand to her waist. She could feel their collective disapproval burning into her back as the larva disappearred into the grass, “Well, there’s no helping it now. Nice work lifting a hand, or anything.”

She shook her head when neither of them responded, and looked back down at Edowin, inspecting his slack form for any sign of movement. And, when nothing happened, she nudged his side with a toe to see if anything else might wriggle out of him. Nope.

Oof… except gas.

And a bowel movement.

The githyanki wrinkled her nose, stepping away from the flatulent corpse while she muttered something about the poor control of the lesser races, “This so-called True Soul carried a tadpole. Their Absolute is no god – it is a ghaik deception, sown by the parasites devouring their minds”

“A mindflayer?” Aster frowned, mind-controlling powers aside, those cultists looked like they were a few sheep short of a flock... If they were all infected – had they started out that way, or was it the tadpoles that did it? “You think it’s the same voice we heard on the ship?”

“Perhaps,” Lae’zel hummed, considering the possibility, “Shared delusion is not a conventional symptom. The mind flayers have a plan for these True Souls... Which means they have a plan for us.”

Aster groaned, pinching the arch of her nose as she mulled over the magnitude of such an event. The mindflayers seemed to be snatching people up from a large swathe of the Sword Coast – Gale from Waterdeep, Astarion from the Gate, herself from Yartar, the gith from gods know where... She had no idea where these Absolute cultists were coming from, but they were in the middle of nowhere now, and, for all purposes, seemed to have been infected much earlier on.

What were the mindflayers up to? Why was it different? Why here? Why were githyanki chasing them? The whole thing sounded ridiculously convoluted.

While the ranger pondered over the likelihood of losing her mind even before she lost her body, a thought occurred to her, “Say… If they’re like us, couldn’t we just… you know… ” She mimicked a gesture of slicing open one’s neck, followed by some gurgling noises.

Astarion chuckled, eyeing her coyly, “I didn’t realise you were so eager to die, darling. You could’ve just said so – I’d be more than happy to comply.”

“No, no,” she held up a hand to stall him, backing up quickly, “I mean, in theory, one of us might die, right? Quite easily – there’s no wanting for people trying to kill us lately – and, we could just… wait to have the tadpole slither off… and… then… bring he/she back to life?

Gale, you have that scroll of resurrection, don’t you?”

“What? That was a one time thing!” Gale balked, “Do you have any idea how expensive scrolls of true resurrection are?”

He shook his head with a scowl, probably mulling over the number of scrolls he’d have to replenish just to survive this interruption to his grander quest of saving the world from himself. “Besides, that’s assuming we have the same thing at all. We could just as easily wind up dead, still with a tadpole, and a fortune shorter.

Gold,” he emphasised, wagging a finger, “I might add, that we don’t currently have.”

Aster narrowed her eyes at him, suspicious, “Don’t you have a tower or something, and a cat? Sounded like you lived a pretty cushy life back home. That's substantial real estate, plus comforts, and the Waterdhavian elite that I’ve seen are pretty loaded. Is your sanity really not worth a thousand coins?”

“That’s _thirty_ thousand gold pieces,” Gale retorted, sulking, “Not that I have anything close to that, so it’s all a moot point.”

Aster waved it off, “No need to get testy, nothing wrong with being poor.

I’m sure a mere resurrection scroll isn’t too hard to aim for.” She muttered, more to herself than anyone around her, as she rounded back towards the druid grove, “Arron had a couple in his stock. Perhaps he’ll give me a discount since we saved their hides.”

“This is insane, I’m not about to kill you just so you might prove a point!”

“Or brilliant! And, as I said, no one has to kill anyone. You can trip and fall into goblins around here.”

**Author's Note:**

> I’ll bet Gale’s basically been living like a hobo these past seven years or so, having bankrupted whatever fortune he once had – first to win back Mystra (that book couldn't have come cheap), then to dying to the many people who might want to see him dead. And when he talks about missing a warm bath and good food, he really means it. Like, really really.


End file.
